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Language skills are fun to learn. We do crossword puzzles as a brain exercise. The re-prints books from the 1970s are full of popular culture that has disappeared. But the hardest part is not understanding the clue's meaning. One last night said "to hide" and we finally gave up...in the back the word skin.

On our trips to the beach 15 or so years ago my then young son sang along to a Grateful Dead tune, Casey Jones. "Riding that train IdaBoCaine" is what he sang and to this day we sing the verse in that way whenever we hear the song.

One of my all time favorite stories on my little brother (who now of course is way taller than I, in his mid-40s and the father of three) was when, at about the age my son is now (10), piped up during the middle of a conversation he was eavesdropping on with the immortal line:

"Wait! I thought pervert was a spice."

It turned out he had somehow confused that with the word "paprika," only God knows how.

Man, I didn't let him forget that one for, oh, a good 15 years or so. Priceless.

I haven't thought about that one in many, many years. Heheheheheeheheh. Think I'll go give him a call--it's been a while.

Imagine my disappointment when I learned that the quote was from a Metafilter reader and not JAC, and that there is thereore no reason to believe that Meadhouse Hall contains a valet who gives you a rummy sort of look if you buy a dress that clashes with your vortex thingummy.

I was in my mid thirties before I got the knock knock joke with the oranges and bananas. I thought the choice of fruit was arbitrary. I thought the supposed humor was solely in the exasperating joke finally coming to an end. It never occurred to me that "orange" was the same as "aren't ya."

You could read and listen an awful lot and still not be able to tell how Taliaferro and St. John are pronounced - or that Voila! Voila! is not the name of a town in Washington. (Do you suppose that French databases have elision fields? (Or would that be a record?))

Dreyfus did not invent the Jacuzzi -- that was Zola (Z-O-L-A Zola, Zo-Zo-Zo-Zo ...)

Finally, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" does not include the line "The girl with colitis goes by".

I have difficulty saying "he's taller than me" in public because I can hear my mother correcting me in my head to "he's taller than I", so I end up saying "he's taller than I am" as a compromise.

I do this too. However, according to the Washington Post copyeditor Bill Walsh, "taller than me" is correct if you consider "than" to be a preposition rather than a conjunction. That way, there's no implied verb "am." "Me" is simply the object of the preposition "than." Here's a usage note on the topic, which says that "such respected authors as Shakespeare, Johnson, Swift, Scott, and Faulkner" have used "than" as a preposition ("taller than me").